Hillary Clinton doesn’t get the love in New Hampshire:
If the New Hampshire Democratic Party?s 100 Club dinner is any bell weather ? Barack Obama will handily win here. When Obama, the dinner?s last speaker, took the stage the crowd surged forward chanting ?O-bam-a? and ?Fired Up, Ready to Go!? So many people pressed toward the stage that an announcer asked people to ?please take their seats for safety concerns.?
By comparison Hillary was twice booed. The first time was when she said she has always and will continue to work for “change for you. The audience, particularly from Obama supporters (they were waving Obama signs) let out a noise that sounded like a thousand people collectively groaning. The second time came a few minutes later when Clinton said: “The there are two big questions for voters in New Hampshire. One is: who will be ready to lead from day one? The second,” and here Clinton was forced to pause as boos from the crowd mixed with cheers from her own supporters. “Is who can we nominate who will go the distance against the Republicans??
Hillary was presumed to be all but unbeatable just a few weeks ago, but clearly is not a popular choice with Democratic Party activists. Triangulated positions and safe choices don’t inspire.
Andrew Olmsted, who also posted here as G’Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq. Andy gave me a post to publish in the event of his death; the last revisions to it were made in July.
“I suppose I should speak to the circumstances of my death. It would be nice to believe that I died leading men in battle, preferably saving their lives at the cost of my own. More likely I was caught by a marksman or an IED. But if there is an afterlife, I’m telling anyone who asks that I went down surrounded by hundreds of insurgents defending a village composed solely of innocent women and children. It’ll be our little secret, ok?
I do ask (not that I’m in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don’t drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don’t cite my name as an example of someone’s life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I’d prefer that you did so.”
Over at toohotfortnr Spencer Ackerman puts Bill Kristol’s most recent and thirty-second declaration of Victory in Iraq .
To get jargony, what happened this year is that Petraeus got all up in their OODA loop, which makes him the first U.S. commander to have done so. But there was never any reason to believe that would be permanent — hence the reason why Gaskin is the only general ever to have used that word in public. The suicide bombings are an indication that the insurgent groups and al-Qaeda in Iraq are shifting their loop up. Now it becomes a question of U.S. counterresponse, shaped by available capabilities. But we’ve passed the high-water mark of U.S. capabilities: the surge brigades will be gone by the spring-summer, owing to the unyielding reality of military overstretch, and Secretary Gates has spoken of bringing 40,000 troops total home by July. Continuing the current strategy will require doing way more with significantly less.
New York Times:
Thirty people were killed Tuesday when a suicide bomber strode into a gathering of mourners at a home in eastern Baghdad and detonated an explosives-packed vest, the Interior Ministry said. It was the most brazen and deadly attack in the capital in months.
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The attack in Baghdad followed the gruesome abduction and killing of five relatives on Tuesday morning in Jalawla, a village northeast of Muqdadiya in Diyala Province. One of the five killed was a policeman, an Iraqi police official in Diyala said.
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Though far fewer civilian deaths have been reported in the last five months than the same period in 2006, recent civilian casualty trends track closely with late 2005, before the bombing of a Shiite shrine enveloped the country in a brutal sectarian war.